Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  The day after the Russwood concert, Elvis gave himself a well-earned three-week vacation. It was his first real time off since becoming a national sensation. He’d always had trouble sleeping, and now sleep sometimes seemed forever out of reach, his foot just going all the time under the sheets.

  He drove down to Tupelo on July 7, and then two days later showed up unexpectedly at June Juanico’s door in Biloxi, with Red West, Gene and Junior Smith, and Arthur Hooten in tow. He was living in the moment now, not really planning much of anything, except to hang with his pals, maybe do a little fishing, a little sightseeing. He put the whole party up at the Sun ’N’ Sand Hotel Court, and then moved to a villa at the Gulf Hills Dude Ranch resort in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. But after fans keyed messages into the paint of his new car, he rented a private home.

  June was walking down Howard Avenue when he arrived, never dreaming he was anywhere near. “There was a group of girls coming up the street, and they saw me and said, ‘June! Elvis Presley’s at your house!’ Boy, I took off at a fast pace to go and see.”

  When she got home, there was no sign of him, only a clutch of schoolgirls in her yard. Her mother, May, told her he’d been there, and that he was really ticked because he didn’t have any privacy. He’d left a message for her to call the Sun ’N’ Sand. The whole town seemed to be on the phone, though, and when she finally got through, Elvis gave her grief about it: “You told everybody in Biloxi I was coming!” She tossed it right back: “I didn’t even know you were coming! You arrive in a white Cadillac convertible with a Memphis tag and your sideburns flapping in the wind? C’mon!”

  Elvis’s presence escalated the rumor flying around Biloxi that he and June were engaged. A New Orleans radio station, WNOE, picked up on it, reporting it on the air, which sent the Colonel into orbit. Parker ordered Elvis to drive to New Orleans immediately and deny it. Unannounced, Elvis walked into the station and did an on-air interview.

  “Elvis, how are you?” the interviewer began.

  “Fine. How are you, sir?”

  “Wonderful. When did you come into town?”

  “Well I just came in a few minutes ago.”

  “You drove up from . . .”

  “A few minutes ago. [Laughs] Yeah, I was in Biloxi and I heard on the radio where I was supposed to be engaged to somebody, so I came down here to see who I was supposed to be engaged to.” [Laughs]

  “Well, just what is the story? Are you engaged to anybody?”

  “The girl they were talkin’ about, June Juanico, I’ve dated a couple times.”

  “Are you . . .”

  “We’re not engaged.”

  “Are you serious about anybody?”

  “I’m serious about my career right now.”

  The interviewer gave it a rest, asked about his next release and his career, and then put him in the hot seat again.

  “How old are you, Elvis?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “What age do you think might be the best for you to get married?”

  “I never thought much about it. In fact, I have never thought of marriage . . . I’ll say this much, I’m not thinkin’ of it right now, but if I were to decide to get married at all, it wouldn’t be a secret. I mean, I’d let everybody know about it. But I have no plans for marriage. I have no specific loves. And I’m not engaged, and I’m not goin’ steady with nobody or nothin’ like that.”

  “Well, you know how this whole thing started last night. We got—”

  “Excuse me for buttin’ in, but I don’t know how it got started, but everywhere I go, I mean, I’m either engaged or married, or I’ve got four or five kids or somethin’ like that.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Everywhere I go. Nah.”

  “You’re as free as the breeze.”

  “That’s right.”

  Elvis’s interviewer then tried to move on.

  “Well, Elvis, thank you so very much again, and we wish you lots and lots of good luck in your continued meteoric rise to stardom. . . .”

  “Thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed talkin’ to you, and I hope that we got the little rumor cleared up, because it’s just a rumor and nothin’ more. If it wasn’t, then I wouldn’t care for tellin’ anybody. I wouldn’t be ashamed of it.”

  “Why don’t you say it just one more time, so people still don’t get the wrong idea?”

  [Laughs] “Well, I’m not engaged, if that’s what it’s supposed to be.”

  He got the heck out of there then, and he and June and the gang went to the Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park to blow off a little steam before heading back to Biloxi. The next morning, June awakened to a phone call from a reporter from the New Orleans Item. “Did I kiss him good night? What do you think? He’s wonderful!”

  A day or so later, they went deep-sea fishing on the boat the Aunt Jennie with June’s mother and her boyfriend, Eddie Bellman. Elvis looked out at the blue water and thought about his upcoming tour of Florida. He still wished he could take his parents to see the ocean, but maybe he could get them to come down to Biloxi now. That way, he could stay down longer with June, too, and not have to worry Gladys. To his surprise, Gladys and Vernon said yes, and the Presleys arrived on Friday, July 13, staying the weekend. Elvis and June took them out on the Aunt Jennie, and then to New Orleans to see the sights before they returned to Memphis. When they parted, Elvis embraced his mother.

  “She would just dig into him,” June noticed. “You could see tears well up in her eyes anytime she left him. His daddy came around the door where his mama was getting in, and he was shaking his daddy’s hand. But Vernon was not really that affectionate, not like she was.”

  Elvis was back in Memphis by July 20, but apparently lovesick, he returned to Biloxi nine days later. He’d talked it over with his mother, and contrary to what he’d told WNOE Radio only ten days earlier, he was serious enough about June to think about marriage. But he wanted her to wait three years. “He said, ‘I can’t get married right away. I promised the Colonel I wouldn’t do anything that would affect my career. Will you wait for me?’ ”

  June hated the “nuisance” of his fame—it was getting so that if they wanted to do anything, they had to wait until the middle of the night to go out so he wouldn’t be mobbed. But she was “crazy insane about Elvis,” so she said yes, she would wait. Elvis’s parents came back down to Biloxi to celebrate.

  Now he wanted June to go with him on his nine-day tour of Florida, ending with a tenth day in New Orleans. It was due to start in Miami in just a few days, on August 3. June’s mother, May, pitched a fit—it wasn’t decent—and said no: Really, what were they thinking?

  Only four months earlier, Elvis had spoken with Gladys about asking Barbara Hearn to go with him on his tour of Texas. But it never got any further than that. “It was very embarrassing to stand there and listen to Mrs. Presley,” Barbara remembers, “but I loved her for it. She said, ‘Her mother will never let her go off like that, and even if she did, I wouldn’t let her go. Barbara is a lady, and I want you to treat her like one.’ ”

  But now Gladys spoke with June’s mother and promised that Elvis would take “great care” of her daughter. “You can trust him,” Gladys said. May weakened, and June packed her bag.

  That left the Colonel as the only person not in favor of the arrangement. Elvis knew how he would react, so he didn’t even tell him he was bringing June along. But trouble erupted the first night, when Elvis played the Olympic Theatre in Miami. June tried to dodge the Colonel backstage, but the press spotted her, and finding out her last name, called her mother for comment.

  “They said, ‘How do you feel about your daughter being on tour with Elvis?’ Because they made it sound like something nasty. Mother said, ‘My daughter has a very level head, and his parents assured me she couldn’t be in better hands.’ And then she made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘Elvis has asked June to marry him.’ That’s when it really hit the fan.’ ”

  Parker took
Elvis aside and sputtered about his “morals,” so June told the Miami News, “Right now, he’s married to his career.” And Elvis was instructed to say, “Well, I have about twenty-five girls that I date.”

  It wasn’t much of a lie. And one more old girlfriend hoped to speak with him again. Seventeen-year-old Regis Wilson, his prom date from Humes, the one who had moved to Florida without telling him, was in the audience. Now she wanted to explain that she’d been too ashamed to share her family circumstances with him, and she hoped he forgave her for leaving like that.

  She also had some news for him: She was married now, and she wanted to introduce her husband, Herb Vaughn. After the concert, she went to the backstage door, but security wouldn’t let her in.

  “But I know Elvis,” she told the guard. “Sure you do,” he said. She was disappointed and somehow knew it was her last chance. But at least a decade later, her brother, Jim Wilson, who was Elvis’s age and had known him from Humes and Lauderdale Courts, saw him at the Memphian Theatre. The theater manager, Dickie Tucker, who had also grown up in the Courts, let Jim into one of the singer’s private gatherings. Elvis was watching Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, and Jim made his way over and introduced himself. Elvis remembered him and wanted to know whatever happened to his sweet little girl. “I just wish I had had the nerve to tell him good-bye,” Regis says today. “That is something I have to live with.”

  By the time Elvis roared into Jacksonville on August 10, he had cut a swath through Tampa, Lakeland, St. Petersburg, Orlando, and Daytona Beach. Colonel Parker, who’d started out in Florida first as a carny, and then as a young promoter, knew every inch of the state. And with the help of Mae Axton, his crack publicity contact, he turned the tour into the epicenter of the national Elvis Movement. Blanketing the region with promotions that framed Elvis just short of a sideshow attraction, he packed the auditoriums with ticket buyers who ranged from the merely curious to the intently carnal.

  Based on the pandemonium Elvis generated the last two times he played Jacksonville, the Colonel booked him for six shows over two days, all at the Florida Theatre, a medium-size venue that held about 2,200 people. On assignment from Collier’s magazine was photographer Jay Leviton, who, like Al Wertheimer, had almost unrestricted access to the cresting star backstage, onstage, over dinner, even in bed at the Roosevelt Hotel. (“He was very casual, very unguarded . . . I was surprised Colonel Parker didn’t control things more.”) As Wertheimer before him, Leviton would put poetry in the pictures—particularly when Elvis would lie facedown onstage, stretching full out on the microphone, saying things every girl in the audience wanted to hear. June would try to stay out of Leviton’s lens, but he would still find her backstage, along with Red West and Junior and Bobby Smith.

  Also on hand that day was Juvenile Court Judge Marion W. Gooding, a servant and crusader for all that was good and upright, and who was determined there would not be a repeat of Elvis’s last trips to Jacksonville, when “aroused fans ripped nearly all [of Elvis’s] clothes off.” Pressured by community leaders from Miami and Daytona Beach, who warned that the depraved singer was swinging his pelvis and heading north, and it was no laughing matter, Judge Gooding had met with them, as well as with the Optimists Club and the National Congress of the P.T.A. All of them were up in arms, “frozen stiff with outrage and bewilderment” at Elvis’s “bizarrely spasmodic and purely sexual” moves. They saw Elvis as arrogant, sneering, dangerous, and defiant—the very embodiment of the 1950s juvenile delinquent—and insisted the judge warn him to tone down his libidinous intensity.

  “They really wanted Daddy to shut down his performance,” said the judge’s daughter, Marilyn Gooding. “Daddy’s heart wasn’t in that, but he did want Elvis to perform clean.”

  “They had me convinced that no teenage girl was safe around Elvis Presley,” Judge Gooding said years later, chuckling at the times. “They wanted me to have him watched at the theater and they wanted his hotel room watched. They had him pictured to me as a real villain. . . . Looking back on it today, of course, it wouldn’t even stir a ripple. Not a single ripple.”

  But in 1956 Judge Gooding took his task with the utmost seriousness and demanded to see the performer and his manager in his chambers before the show. Photographer Leviton went along, capturing the disdain on Gooding’s grumpy face, and the flushed emotion—part shame, part anger—on Elvis’s. The judge warned him he would be at the first show to make sure Elvis did as he was told, and that he had prepared warrants charging him with “impairing the morals of minors.” He would serve them, too, he said, if Elvis wiggled his hips and “put obscenity and vulgarity in front of our children.” As if for proof, deputies would be stationed in the wings.

  Afterward, the singer told reporters, “I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I know my mother approves of what I’m doing.” And the judge called Elvis a sweet, gentle, kid, “with the sort of good manners that we associate with southern politeness.”

  Still, the judge attended the first show at three-thirty. Onstage, Elvis opened with “Heartbreak Hotel” and threw his hips out once. “I’m going to put him in jail, sure as anything,” Gooding whispered to the lawyer for the theater. But then Elvis caught himself and had his fun. “Wait a minute. I can’t do this. They won’t let me do this here,” he told the audience, and then he wiggled his little finger suggestively in place of his usual movements. It thrilled the crowd, who found “the finger” both hilarious and deeply erotic. “The kids went nuts anytime he did anything,” June says. “He could just make a funny face, and they would scream. These teenagers would just go crazy.”

  The judge went backstage afterward and told Elvis and the Colonel that all was well. Secretly, they’d reached a compromise anyway, the Colonel posting bond and Elvis joining the American Guild of Variety Artists, which also represented exotic dancers.

  But Elvis was still wounded.

  “It hurt his feelings,” June remembers. “Elvis was not vulgar. He did not do a bump and grind. He swiveled his hips slightly, but no forward movement. No pelvic thrusts.”

  Yes, the boy kept his word, the judge told his wife, Eunice. “He went back to his chambers and telephoned me and told me how clean the show was, and he said, ‘Tell the girls to line up their little friends, and you can put them in the station wagon and bring them to the next show.’ ”

  So Judge Gooding’s wife, their three daughters, and their girlfriends all went down to the Florida Theatre. Even they roared when Elvis dedicated “Hound Dog” to the judge. “Everybody in the audience got the biggest charge out of that,” said Marilyn.

  At the Roosevelt after the show, Elvis told June all about it: “Baby, you should have been there. Every time D. J. did his thing on the drums, I wiggled my finger, and the girls went wild. I never heard screams like that in my life. I showed them sons of bitches—calling me vulgar. Baby, you don’t think I’m vulgar, do you?” She assured him that she didn’t. Then to lighten the mood, Elvis put a pair of June’s panties on his head and strode around the room.

  Gladys, later hearing about Judge Gooding, told her son to never, ever go back to Jacksonville. There was nothing for him there except trouble.

  But he had made some new fans.

  The judge’s grandson, Tony, would grow up to idolize Elvis and plaster Presley posters all over his walls. And the last Christmas the judge was alive, he gave his wife an album of Elvis singing religious songs.

  At some point during the Jacksonville gig, Elvis was to meet with Andrea June Stevens, of Atlanta, Georgia, who’d won a contest, “Win a Date with Elvis,” through Hit Parader magazine. She’d written an essay about why she wanted to meet him. But when the moment came, the dark-haired girl was nervous standing in the corridor at the hotel. She’d also had wicked cramps on the flight, and the butterflies didn’t go away until they opened the door to Elvis’s hotel room.

  Then there he was, in black pants and loafers, white socks, and a white shirt with a comb—a couple of teeth noticeably
missing—sticking out of his breast pocket. He accented it all with a matching white knit tie, and a white belt, slid over to the side so the buckle wouldn’t bump his guitar when he played.

  He called Andrea June “honey” and made her feel at ease on the sofa next to him, introducing her to his cousins. She was his age, or thereabouts, and soon she saw he wasn’t really so intimidating at all.

  After a little while, Elvis stood up and put on his kelly green jacket. They were going out to eat—after all, Andrea June had won a dinner date. But as they left the hotel entrance, the sight of him was just too much for one young girl, who fainted dead away, going down like a bowling pin. Somebody carried her to a couch inside, and Elvis, worried, stayed with her, calling her name and putting her hand up to his face. Finally, she came to—embarrassed that everybody was staring down at her—and Red got a souvenir program for Elvis to sign. It was just for her, Elvis told her. And please, next time she saw him, would she mind not fainting?

  Now there wasn’t much time left, so he and June ended up just with a quick bite at a diner. He wolfed down a cheeseburger, but Andrea June’s tummy still didn’t feel right, and so she passed. Back at the Roosevelt, after Elvis’s last performance, he called June from the lounge and said, “You’ve got to get your butt down here! I’ve told June all about you.”

  June was confused. “You told June all about me?”

  “Yeah, her name is June, too. Get on down here. She knows you’re here. We’re having a good time.”

  She went on down to the bar and found a crowd of young people and reporters. Elvis was playing the piano and motioned for June to sit on the side of the bench with him. Then he excused himself, saying, “Okay, my two baby girls, I’ll be right back.” Andrea June turned to Elvis’s real date. “Do you realize how lucky you are?” she said.